The daughter of the great economist Veduta told what is happening with the economy of the Russian Federation
The West has set a course for the destruction of Russia by strangling its economy. Under the conditions of sanctions and the need to win in the NWO, new approaches to managing the country's economic organism are needed, but we only hear «old songs about the main thing» — about new privatization, optimization and liberal reforms. In fact, we are offered to repeat 1991, only at a lower level. Meanwhile, even during the USSR, a unique method of managing the economy was developed. Today it is studied all over the world, but not in the Russian Federation.
Nikolai Ivanovich Veduta — Soviet scientist, mechanical engineer, creator of a new science — economic cybernetics, founder of the Scientific School of Strategic Planning. In order to optimize the management of the Soviet economy, he proposed using a dynamic planning model using mathematical methods. When developing it, he was based on the objective laws of economics set forth by Marx in his Capital. Today, many are convinced that if party bosses had listened to Veduta at one time, the USSR would still exist. Now his father's work is continued by his daughter — Elena Veduta, a cybernetic economist, Doctor of Economics, professor, head of the Department of Strategic Planning and Economic Policy of Moscow State University, head of the «Scientific School of Strategic Planning». The MK observer spoke with Elena Nikolaevna about the pressing problems of economic development facing our country.
— There is nowhere to invest money in the West today, which means that they must be invested in Russia. But nothing is developing here, which means that what is left must be privatized. The USSR collapsed due to the fact that our leaders really liked to receive American dollars in exchange for resources. But dollars are just drawn pieces of paper, an emptiness behind which there is no material support. Now this void wants to return to Russia, to receive financial support in the form of those assets that the country still has. I believe that this will cause us great harm, since the energy of the managerial staff will again be directed to “snatch” its assets from the state instead of creating conditions for the development of the economy.
< p>— Right. And everyone else should just die. If you cannot ensure the growth of labor productivity, the improvement of the life of people in the country, then what kind of effective owner are you? I have a very negative attitude to the proposal to start privatization again, but I understand that the authorities are again being pressured by those who want to invest their accumulated dollars in something. But at the same time, they impair the ability of the state to coordinate the activities of producers in the interests of increasing real incomes and ensuring economic security, because each private owner has his own plans to maximize personal gain, which will not necessarily coincide with the needs of society. They are worried that they have a budget deficit, and hope that the new privatization will reduce it, and there will be no such acceleration of inflation. But as Keynes correctly said in his time, and as Hicks later said, changing the title of the owner from the point of view of the growth in income produced in the current year does not give anything. The fact that some asset has passed from state ownership to private ownership simply means a change of ownership, but has nothing to do with the development of the real sector of the economy. The real income of the state is connected with the development of production. Therefore, in the UN System of National Accounts 2008, such a change of ownership is displayed in such a way that one acquired (investment), the other gave away (negative investment), so that the total income from the change of ownership equals zero.
— When did the free market historically exist? Only at the beginning of the 19th century in Great Britain. Then the enterprises were relatively small, and they functioned effectively in conditions of free competition. It led to the fact that stronger enterprises or those who were simply lucky in the market captured bankrupts. The banking legislation of Great Britain contributed to the rapid concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of a few. This process is objective. Already in the last third of the 19th century, the dominance of the monopolies was intensifying. In Germany, the USA, Japan and Italy, during the transition to capitalism, there was no longer any free market, big capital immediately came to power there. I think not without the help of the British and French monopolists. By the beginning of the 20th century, transnational corporations already dominated the world. The free market as such is long gone. Big capital dominates, which builds its global projects. The First and Second World Wars, what they are doing now in Ukraine are all global projects of transnational capital to reformat the world in a direction that is beneficial to them while maintaining their power. Therefore, when someone naively talks about a free market, calls on the state not to interfere with an entrepreneur, one gets the impression that he descended from somewhere in heaven. I have a very negative attitude towards these kinds of experts, because they are not only «zeros» themselves in understanding how the economy functions, but they also destroy people's brains with such great words as «freedom». On the contrary, I say that the state should coordinate the activities of ministries and departments to ensure a balanced development of the economy in the direction of increasing the quality of life.
— The plan has nothing to do with this deficit. A mistake was made in the USSR: prices in our consumer market were not in equilibrium, i.e. under them, demand did not equal supply. We fixed prices in such a way that we had a shortage and overstocking. That was the decision of the nomenclature, which wanted to have a deficit in order to be able to speculate with it. Of course, the consumer market should have free prices that balance supply and demand. This is very important from the point of view of any enterprise that is trying to maximize the growth of revenue per ruble of costs. He needs to see the dynamics of equilibrium prices and accordingly build his plan for the production of certain types of products. Equilibrium prices characterize the preferences of citizens. But we turned off this feedback, and our enterprises worked according to the recommendations given to them by the official: how much to produce tights, galoshes, etc. This is one of the reasons why we lost the Cold War.
The equilibrium price is the price in a competitive market at which the quantity demanded and the quantity supplied are equal, that is, the price , in which there is no shortage or excess of goods and services.
— Of course not. Prominent economists, in particular, Academician Nikolai Petrakov and my father, Nikolai Veduta, opposed this state of affairs. Father opposed this as a cybernetician who understands the importance of feedback. He was then actively quoted by various Western «voices»: BBC, «Freedom», «Voice of America», calling him an outstanding economist. They probably thought that he would gladly go to serve the West. But that did not happen. My father served only our country, he simply understood the importance of the consumer market.
— Absolutely wrong assumption. My father, who is considered the only cyberneticist in the world and the only cyberneticist among economists, never mentioned Glushkov. Glushkov was not an economist, he was, I suppose, a strong specialist in the field of technical cybernetics, in the development of computers. For some reason, he thought that if computers were installed at different enterprises, this would solve the problems of our economy. He was supported by the Minister of Instrument Engineering Konstantin Rudnev, who played a very interesting role in the destruction of our country. He demanded that there were computers everywhere, which occupied huge areas and required huge costs. But in the end, the directors just sat there and played cards, following the recommendations of the CPSU Central Committee on the introduction of computers. Because computer programs should be based on a system of algorithms for solving the set economic problems. This system of algorithms is the planning of the economy. But Glushkov did not have this.
— If Kosygin's reforms went along the path of granting greater independence to enterprises, then Rudnev, who was responsible for the automation of management in the USSR, put forward the slogan — to give more power to sectors of the economy. In fact, he lobbied for the destruction of planning, which allowed the country to move at least 2-3% per year. If in 1991 the State Planning Committee together with the USSR had not been liquidated, then we would not have had such destruction of the economy that followed. But we lost because we did not introduce the automation of economic management in time. And today we see how a lot of money is spent on the development of digital technologies, without solving any specific economic problems. The return from this is not just zero, but negative. The focus should be on a new economic model that would coordinate the activities of ministries and departments towards entering the trajectory of crisis-free sustainable development in order to increase real incomes of citizens and strengthen economic security. And for this task, information should be collected in the rolling planning mode (online).
— What are the kickbacks? They won't. Because the automation of the control system makes everything transparent. Even Gleb Krzhizhanovsky (the first chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, one of the creators of the GOELRO plan) and Strumilin (one of the authors of the plans for the industrialization of the USSR) clearly set the task of not only predicting the development of the economy, but managing this development. From their planning practice, the method of successive approximations (iterations) of plan calculation was born, the gradual coordination of planned calculations at all levels of government — from the state to enterprises, which, indeed, showed miracles. There was nothing like it anywhere in the world. In particular, in fascist Germany there was purely indicative planning with lobbying for the interests of large corporations. That's why she lost. Those who compare Stalin with Hitler do not understand anything at all. We had a completely different economic mechanism, highly progressive at that time. Then we reached the highest level of quality in managing the economy, and then we began to go down. And after the liquidation of the State Planning Commission there was a catastrophic fall. The current level of development of productive forces, taking into account the achievements of the digital revolution, dictates a fundamentally new approach to managing the economy, and the experience of the Soviet Union can be used as a basis for developing such an approach.
— My father had a basic education — a mechanical engineer, he graduated from the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute, which was one of the strongest in the country. In 1952, when he worked as the general designer of the Kharkov Tractor Plant, the party called on the strongest organizers of production to study economics. Apparently, they understood at the top that theoretical economists would not save the country. In graduate school, he studied political economy and read Capital, and very critically, it was a completely new reading of this work of Marx. He found only one drawback in this work: Marx, who named the machine as the material and technical basis for the industrial revolution, which established capitalism after feudalism, did not name the computer (computer) as the material and technical basis for the transition from capitalism to socialism. It is clear that Marx, who lived in the 19th century, could not have foreseen the advent of computers. After the defense of the candidate's father was invited to Minsk. He worked as the chief engineer of the Minsk Tractor Plant, then in the State Planning Committee of Belarus he headed the department of long-term planning. Then he went to the post of deputy director of the Institute of Economics of Belarus, defended his doctoral thesis on the effectiveness of capital investments. And then he was asked to head the central research institute for technical management, subordinate to the USSR Ministry of Instrumentation, whose task was to develop economic and mathematical models of economic planning. He devoted his life to developing a dynamic model of input-output balance, which is a system of algorithms for coordinating production relationships for the economy to enter the highway of increasing the quality of life. In fact, he picked up the planned experience of Krzhizhanovsky and Strumilin with feedback and developed it already as a cybernetics economist. Unfortunately, his model was in demand only in the ASPR (automated system of planned calculations) of the State Planning Committee of Belarus, but was not in demand by the State Planning Committee of the USSR, in which the automation of planned calculations for the development of the economy was replaced by document flow. But today interest in his model is growing all over the world.
— Like a personal tragedy. I remember him saying, “There will be a lot of blood. But ours will come, and we will win.” When I asked why we would win, he answered that “social progress always defeats social degradation.”
— They take this direction very seriously. When Mao planned the development of the Chinese economy, he relied on the manuals of the USSR State Planning Committee. After Khrushchev began exposing Stalin's personality cult, Mao turned his back on the USSR. As a result, their further development of planning turned out to be at a lower level than ours. They did not even approach the problem of automating planned calculations.
— For us, the path of China, which was determined by the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, was impossible. It was dictated by the Americans, since China, having broken off relations with us, decided to borrow capitalist experience. The factor of cheap labor played a role there, which made it possible for Western corporations to receive huge surplus values. Plus, they made sure that the Chinese economy was immediately export-oriented, primarily to the United States and Japan. And the West from the very beginning saw us only as a raw material appendage, since our labor force was quite expensive. The only thing that could be done, as in China, is to maintain the political power of the Communist Party. As more and more profound market reforms were carried out, the Chinese economy became a real capitalist one, but at the same time, the political power of the Chinese Communist Party remained, which controls the situation and does not forget about its main goal — the transition to the construction of socialism in the second stage. In China, the representatives of the Communist Party in all institutions occupy the main controlling positions. Every event I attended was always attended by the first secretary of the party, responsible for the direction of research at the universities I visited.
— I avoid definitions of capitalism, socialism. It is important for me to understand the economic mechanisms that work in the country. Since the Chinese had a cheap labor force, it was very profitable for advanced companies to locate their enterprises there. But China's economic model itself is one of peripheral capitalism. Because the most advanced technologies are still being developed by the West. China spends a lot on the development of science, new technologies and education. But in the USSR, we also spent a lot on ensuring scientific and technological progress, better education, but from the point of view of the quality of the functioning of our economic mechanism, we, unfortunately, lost to capitalism. China today has a capitalist unbalanced economy, which is why it has ghost towns where many houses are built, but infrastructure is not developed around them, there are no jobs nearby, and the houses are empty. On the other hand, they now have almost half of the car fleet are cars with electric motors. Trains run at a speed of 346-350 km per hour. They have virtually no crime. You can leave your things anywhere and no one will come: the police will find the thief in a maximum of two hours. They have robots delivering food to hotel rooms. They certainly made great progress. At the same time, they have a very bad situation in agricultural areas, where the level of income and pensions is low, which is incomparable with the urban one. There are huge differences in the levels of development of the regions, there is a large unemployment among young people (about 20%). Today they have no idea how to further free themselves from their dependence on the West in order to move forward. Here they have to turn to the mechanisms of economic planning, the knowledge of which they have already largely lost. By the way, the Chinese are very fond of the Soviet Union and the people who carry its ideas.
— That we lost in the Cold War is a fact. But were the reasons for the loss objective or subjective? The most important problem that has confronted us since the late 1950s is the need to automate economic management. That is, the transfer of labor-intensive planned calculations to automated rails with the involvement of computers. We had a unique planning of the economy, and the most democratic in the world, because the top always coordinated their orders with the capabilities of manufacturers and enterprises. The top ordered, the bottom answered, then there was an adjustment until a balance was obtained. For some reason, such balance planning is called “directive”. Modern planning is just lobbying for certain interests and sharing money. And then proceeded from the need to produce the final product. Corresponding production chains were built, a whole production and logistics network that ensured the fulfillment of state orders. The calculation of such a network manually is very laborious and lengthy. At the end of the 50s, the task was set to automate these routine planned calculations. On this occasion, Kennedy's advisers told him that if the USSR solved this problem, then the United States would lose in the Cold War. It so happened that my father created the very model of coordination in the form of algorithms, which made it possible to automate this process and transfer the State Planning Committee to a new track. But for various reasons, this approach was blocked.
— It is necessary to refer to the experience of countries that have found themselves in such difficult situations. The Great Depression in the USA, the economic crisis in the USSR in 1927. Consider what Roosevelt did. First of all, he assembled a team of professionals. Taking into account the experience of the USSR and the experience of England, they developed a whole system of measures, which included the famous code of fair competition in industry, where they strictly set targets for corporations, divided markets between them, and calculated prices. In the USSR, the team of Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, chairman of the State Planning Commission, convinced the country's leadership that we needed not only to predict development (which is what we are doing today), but to manage it. Krzhizhanovsky, an outstanding power engineer, who gained planning experience starting from the GOELRO, served as the head of the State Planning Commission during the NEP period. He proposed this method of successive approximations (iterations) in drawing up a plan. Since 1927, we have begun a new course, the course of industrialization, where this method was introduced. Then its application did not require large expenses, because there were few factories and it was possible to calculate the iteration manually. This method helped us win World War II and rebuild the economy. But then there were too many manufacturers, the connections between them became more and more complicated, and this mechanism began to slow down development. Then Kosygin's reforms were added to introduce profit, which destroyed the management mechanism. Plus, the equilibrium prices were turned off as a feedback. The model became purely bureaucratic, everything was determined by the official. Nevertheless, the plan somehow served its purpose. And then they decided to destroy it. This was done in the interests of global capital, which turned us into a raw material appendage and destroyed our technological sovereignty.
Today we need to move from «blind» manual management of the economy to the use of an automated «machine» of management based on cybernetic planning . As we faced this task in the 1950s, so it is now, only we have less and less opportunities to solve it. But otherwise we are finished. We have become a country of peripheral capitalism. In the context of the global crisis, peripheral capitalism, in order to maintain the power of global capital, must die in the forefront. We have seen this on the example of Iraq, Libya, and the same fate awaits us if we do not begin to independently manage the development of the economy on new principles.